The Littlest Meap

Television

Posted by: meaplet on: September 5, 2009

Last week, I acquired two things of note (for certain definitions of “of note”). They are, in chronological order, an antenna so that I can watch broadcast tv, and the worst head cold I’ve head since 2003, which trapped me in my apartment for two days with nothing to do but knit and watch tv.

In fact, I acquired them in such short succession that back somewhere in the animal parts of my brain, I half suspect the tv of making me sick. I hooked up the antenna Tuesday night, watched a documentary on Andy Warhol, and went to sleep, only to wake up at two am with a killer sore throat and the realization that I’d been having a feverish nightmare about Warhol.

Having not lived with broadcast, cable, or the like since I graduated from high school, and having experienced only the rural version of broadcast tv (three stations if you’re lucky and point your antenna in the right direction), I was highly startled by the number of broadcast channels that are available in the middle of a city. I feel like I have 90 channels, although that is probably an exaggeration. Certainly I have four or five variations of PBS, three Korean stations, one in Japanese, four in Chinese, six in Spanish.

And I have the Nasa channel. It’s somewhat hypnotic in the level of boredom it provides. With the Space Shuttle Discovery currently docked at the International Space Station, it offers twenty-minute interludes of the projector screens at Mission Control, interspersed with low-resolution images of Earth from space and indoor shots in which a pair of legs occasionally float up from the bottom of the screen. I can’t even imagine what this station descends to when there is not thrilling space construction underway.

On the other hand, I am frustrated to find that I can’t find any outside confirmation of the news I learned in tonight’s mission briefing, that today during a space walk one of the astronaut’s helmets came loose and began to spin around his head. I was washing dishes when they played a video of this, and I cannot imagine how it is that he survived, so that they’re talking about it as an annoyance and not a tragic death. Did I mishear? Is there a second, inner helmet? I demand answers to these questions!

And I promise, if I do not get them, I will go back to watching Korean soap operas instead.

4 Responses to "Television"

Molly, you are the greatest. I can’t answer any of your questions though.

The answer turns out to be that it was the helmet ::camera:: that came loose, and not the helmet itself.

Oh man. Was the $4 antenna you bought at Big Lots really all that was standing between you and actual television?

Turns out, the $4 antenna was all that stood between me and a major addiction to NASA tv.

Comments are closed.